She will still love you
by J. M. Flowers
Summary: Because if you let her, she will love you, whoever you choose to be. Arizona - post-Malawi, post-plane crash, post-wedding - written in second person. Rediscovering your own identity even it may lie in shambles all around you.


**AN: **I truly have no explanation for this piece, beyond stating that it was rather cathartic to write.

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**She Will Still Love You**

You should've waited. Should've stayed there, in the heat of Malawi, and come back in three years as a different person. Sure, there'd be a little girl you didn't know and skin you couldn't remember the taste of, but the world wouldn't be so fragile. Things would seem a little less broken, a little more easily repaired.

Maybe the plane crash would've still happened, but you wouldn't have been on it. There would never be four days of agony etched into your brain that far outweigh the pain of choosing your dream over her. There'd be no memory of femur snapped and shoved through muscle and layers of skin, no shaky discussion of amputation. You wouldn't know the rubbing ache of plastic, of off-balance steps and hinges that are not truly your own. There'd be joints beneath this flesh of yours, real bone beneath the silky fabric of your pants. You wouldn't know the sound of her sobbing, blurring harmonies of his moans. You wouldn't still taste the hope in the back of your throat, that part of you that begged him to hang on. To keep fighting. To come home with you. Because, God, you wouldn't have spent a single second alone in those woods with the animals and the darkness and the fear.

The greatest fear you would know would be losing her.

That's what would make it easier, the fixing. The repairing of the frayed edges you both cling to so desperately now. There'd be a different sort of ache inside of you, some part of you that sat with her at dinner and talked about it. Talked about the warmth of Africa, the sounds of children laughing, the darkness of the moments spent huddled over the operating table when things went wrong. You'd be a different woman, someone who'd faced hardships as a singular person, who walked away from the tragedy with her head held high. You'd be the woman you can't seem to find within yourself anymore.

And God, she'd be so beautiful after all that time apart. With her hair grown out from that bad decision, and her face fuller from pregnancy, and the glow of motherhood in her cheeks. Exhaustion, she'd tell you with a laugh, but you'd know better. You've always known how children make her light up, even when she'd rather scream in frustration. That'd be her bubble of hope - it always has been - stuck right there between her heart and her stomach, fluttering them both.

She'd never know the dark aftermath of a car accident when it's your own body that's been tossed through a windshield, your skin tarnished and torn by threads of shattered glass. Neither of you would understand the racing heartbeat that comes with almost losing a child, of choosing between the tender life beneath your fingertips and the heaving breath of its mother. You wouldn't have spent any time screaming with Mark over whose turn it was to love her. He would've had his turn; so would you.

You'd love her now, with calloused fingers and sun-tinged skin and freckled expanses. With hair licked by the sun for more hours in three years than it ever knew in three decades, with a nose that's been red for so long you've begun to wonder if it will be permanent. The first kiss will be like falling backwards into history, but you've both learned to stand taller and stronger on your own. There's no turning back the hands of time when you're steady on your feet. But your knees will still shake when she remembers exactly where to press her tongue, the exact spot to curl her fingers.

Only, you wouldn't know Sofia. Maybe that's the worst part of it, knowing you'd have sacrificed your little girl for the sake of it all. When you never would've sacrificed her before. Because she wouldn't know the sound of your voice in the middle of the night, rocking her gently back to sleep. She wouldn't know the taste of those pancakes you try desperately to make every Sunday morning as she giggles from her high chair (and now her booster seat, and soon just a bar stool at the counter). She'll be the shy little girl you tug by the hand, urging forward in the face of company, fingers in her mouth and nudging her face into the back of your knee. But it'll be you on the other side, trying to catch a glimpse of her Gerber cheeks or the Cheshire grin you've heard so much about. It'll be you, sitting tentatively on the couch near her toys, hoping that she offers you some token. Hoping that someday she'll crawl into your lap and declare you _hers_.

And for what? So she'd be as sharply jaded as she was that first week back, when you knocked on her door with your tear-choked voice and she closed it in your face. When you fought against yourself to sit right there all night and wait for her, giving out because she couldn't possibly love you with your plane-warmed skin. With the sweat stains beneath your arms and the teeth you hadn't brushed in two days and the bloodshot eyes from so many hours of sobbing. She couldn't possibly take you back when you were a wreck of a person.

If only you'd known then, just how far she'd go for you. Just how much she'd take in exchange for your love. How many nights she'd curl into bed with sadness wrapping its crimson fist around her stomach and pretend it was okay because you were alive. Because you were breathing and one day, one God damned day, you'd break out of the shell and come back to her. You'd have come back to her a thousand times, if you'd known, would've sat outside her apartment for days in exchange for her hand helping you up off the carpet. In exchange for a single smile.

She's spent so long waiting, like you're some butterfly that's going to emerge from a cocoon. And she's been the little girl checking on the chrysalis for a flutter of movement beneath its hard exterior. Maybe she thought she saw you emerging, thought she'd guide you into the world with a helping hand. But, somehow, something went wrong and your wings are too heavy and your chest is too swollen and you're fumbling before you even try to take flight. And she thinks she was just helping you, but she doesn't know that the butterfly needs the struggle to survive, needs to spend those precious moments fighting against the hardened shell so fluid can be forced from the body and into the wings. So it can be strong enough, ready enough, to stretch outwards and soar.

Or maybe you were just a moth all along.

Maybe you're so lost right now because you made the wrong mistakes. Turned back on the wrong dreams, came home before you were ready. Maybe you needed the struggle in Malawi, so you could be the woman she deserves to love. The kind of woman who knows how to lose control sometimes without it being in an on call room, without some woman you'll forget the name of in a week. The kind of woman who doesn't feel like a broken puzzle piece, shards of herself left scattered across the life you lived together. Because you needed time apart. You both needed time without each other.

Maybe, if you'd stayed there, you'd get to be the strong one again. You've always been much better at that, at holding up the people around you. You could be the one standing beside her at the funeral, clutching her hand as his body is lowered into the ground. You wouldn't be the coward holed up in her bedroom, unable to move and unwilling to try. You could be there for her, as she mourned the death of her best friend, instead of screaming at her that she ruined you. She never would've had the chance.

And maybe a doctor from Malawi would better understand that you don't become less of a person when you lose a limb. That sometimes, you just become better, healthier, stronger. More capable. Because sometimes it's the leg that's bad for you and living without it is what's best, sometimes the pain of missing it is far less than the pain it was to drag it around behind you. That doctor, she would've seen children left behind with pieces of themselves they couldn't bear to carry anymore, and she would've fixed them. She would've cut away the broken parts and watched those same children run across the fields, through the streets, with a light inside them so bright no missing pieces could ever extinguish them. She'd know that you can't let the broken parts of yourself win.

That's what you're doing, really. You're letting all the darkness outshine your light and then resenting her for trying to dig it out. That's what she's been doing, all these months, trying to dig out the brightness she knew before. And maybe you're not that person anymore, maybe you never will be again, but she can't know that on her own. She can't crawl into the future and pull out the person she loves, the woman she misses. It was always you who walked away - not her. Never her.

So you need to be better. You need to do better. You need to stop fucking up and searching for yourself in other people and take one Godforsaken second to look at yourself. To find the pieces of yourself that would've surfaced, if you'd stayed in Malawi. The suit of armor you let get buried in the concave of your stomach because why would you ever need it when you had her? You let yourself get lost in relationships, let yourself drown in love until it wasn't there and then went searching for a way to recreate it. When, really, what you should've been doing was rebuilding. Taking the chopped down limbs of your trees and building a log cabin out of them. Rubbing out the knots and sanding down the rough edges and turning it into a place you could call home.

You need to learn how to call your body home again.

You need to stop casting her aside, need to stop worrying about the person she wants you to be. She doesn't want that, not really, it's just what you think. Stop letting your perceptions be the ruling hand of your life, they will guide you down the wrong paths. They will leave you in the shadows they create. You have to stop being a pawn in someone else's game and start being the queen of your board.

Because if you let her, she will love you, whoever you choose to be. She loved you through the airport, with her voice left shaking and her cheeks stained and her begging you not to _do this_. She loved you when you came back, when you could've walked away from the life within her womb, when you asked her to marry you with frustrations on your tongues and she still said yes. She's loved you through more than one mistake.

You could've waited, in the heat of Malawi and come back three years later as a different person. You could've lived the life you have with her. Either way, you'd be standing at this point as someone new. Someone still evolving. There's still the same stuff inside of you, waiting to emerge. There's still a suit of armor beneath your skin, still a sword pressed against your femur. There's still a battle cry inside your chest that's waiting to break free. It's always been inside of you. You just need to take the time to rip it out of you, to tug all the pieces out of your identity and make a new one. Sometimes you have to rip the walls down and start fresh.

She will still love you if you do.


End file.
